Uncharted 4 is a 17 hour long action movie, made of thrilling chases and collapsing buildings, deadly puzzle-traps and betrayal. But it’s also a 17 hour action movie of climbing (oh so much climbing) and mediocre cover-based gunfights with generic bad guys with guns.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End concludes the story of Nathan Drake, the world’s best – and worst – treasure hunter. He is the best because he has found multiple lost, legendary cities and their treasures by following a series of clues left behind by long-dead historical figures who did not die when or how history popularly described – long-dead lost cities which had surprisingly sophisticated technology for the early 1700s, especially, as in the case of this game, where a city was built by a bunch of pirates.
And yet, he is living a middle-class existence because every time he finds some rare treasure, it ends up getting destroyed or otherwise blown up by a pesky band of bad guys – in this case, Shoreline PMC, a multinational mercenary force working for one Rafe Adler and led by Nadine Ross, a ruthless woman who repeatedly beats the snot out of Nathan Drake, but never actually kills him.
Assisting him in his adventures are his wife, Elena Fisher, his best friend, Victor Sullivan, and his brother, Sam Drake, the man who drew Nathan into treasure hunting in the first place before being shot and “killed” in a Panamanian prison 15 years ago while working with Rafe Adler.
Needless to say, given his position on the list, Sam is alive and well, and the game is kicked off by a desperate need to find the treasure of one Captain Avery, an eccentric pirate captain who loved building death traps used to test those who would “join him in paradise”, which, over the course of the game, you come to learn contains a great deal of pirate treasure indeed (assuming, of course, it wasn’t all spent or sunk on the bottom of the ocean somewhere). Sam was busted out of the prison he’d been stuck in by a notorious, ruthless Panamanian criminal, and it is up to you to find the treasure so that said criminal can be given the 50% of the Avery treasure that he demands, in exchange for freeing (and not murdering) Sam Drake.
Thus is launched a whirlwind adventure that takes you fom Panama, through Europe and Britain, and eventually to the tropics. You travel across a variety of different landscapes and settings, all in search of this lost treasure, the treasure always in the next place, just ahead, with Rafe, Nadine, and an army of PMC goons either hot on your trail, or already there ahead of you trying to find the treasure only for you to sneak in under their noses.
The game works quite well, with a plotline full of lies, betrayal, tests of people’s bonds (both of friends and family), and of course, a lot of bloodshed. You end up gunning down a small army of goons, though, somewhat amusingly (and unusually for the genre), depicting it as actually having an effect on them by the end – by the final chapter, the bad guy is down to only a handful of mercenaries, with the rest having been killed by our heroes, or dying horribly to insane pirate booby-traps.
Because everything is ancient, stuff is crumbling around you all the time, leading to a bunch of sequences where you jump on stuff, grab on, only for it to break, and you going on some crazy little adventure where you only barely cling on and survive or run along collapsing wreckage. And when the ruins themselves aren’t busy collapsing on their own, Shoreline is more than happy to blow it up for you to generate these sequences. These are the coolest action sequences in the game, and lead to a bunch of crazy-looking events – but it also can feel a little wearing at times, because after you’ve seen it happen a half-dozen times, it’s no longer actually *surprising* when it does so yet again – indeed, the game is so eager to do this, it happens multiple times per chapter in most of the game.
The game does a pretty good job of keeping things moving; the game switches between moving through and exploring environments, gunfights, and action sequences fairly well, giving you a pretty good variety of environments to fight across and to solve puzzles in.
What the game does not do a good job on is combat. The game is a very basic cover-based shooter, and the combat encounters are just not that good. The enemies are just “guys with guns”, and while they try to mix up the environments, in the end you’re just fighting while ducking behind waist high walls and around corners in a very standard cover-based shooter format, with no special powers and pretty bland “realistic” guns. The final boss fight at the end of the game at least tries to mix things up with a unique swordfighting minigame, and it’s only OK (though it is better than having yet another samey shootout, I suppose).
The game is also extremely linear, and while this is not a “bad thing” per se, it is palpable – you do not have much of a sense of agency in this game, it is more like experiencing a long action movie with quick time events than it is actually being the hero. And sometimes, like some of the climbing sections, it feels like the mechanics are just there because it is obligatory – climbing around, while it gives you some nice views, is a bit repetitive.
Overall, this is a good game in many ways, but is held back from true greatness by its mediocre core game mechanics and sometimes-repetitive action sequences. While the game does a very good job of being cinematic and feeling like an action movie, it doesn’t do quite as good a job of actually being a game with good gameplay. I’d still recommend this game, but with the caveat that it’s more of a strong experience with a mediocre game attached to it than the other way around.
4.0